Credit

Restrictions:

Not for poster use.

Caption

A GeoSphere globe, featuring Asia and Australia, on a starry background. The globe is a composite created from thousands of separate images recorded by the Tiros-N series of meteorological satellites of NOAA. Each Tiros image was selected to best show the characteristics of a particular region. The chosen images were collated into a vast database using a graphics supercomputer which then generated this composite. The picture is one of the results of the GeoSphere Project, created by Tom Van Sant in Santa Monica, California.